"... authenticity has travelled so far from its roots that it has become its opposite ...

"The notion of authenticity that emerged during the Enlightenment was a ‘close twin’ of moral autonomy. To think and act for oneself, and therefore to develop a truer, more authentic expression of the self, required one to be independent of the judgement of others. But in its modern, politicised form, authenticity has been institutionalised as a ‘social aspiration’ – something that people are expected to cultivate, and which therefore depends on validation by others. ‘[T]his new form of dependency, generated by the ethic of authenticity, has another name: narcissism’,"

That's from an interesting piece at Spiked.

“Authenticity” has long troubled me. Once upon a time I thought the concept morally useless. I'd no longer say that. I think that it has a place but that it is of limited use. It is one of a number of concepts—purity, sincerity and truth are other examples—that seem terribly important for morality but turn out to do very little real work.

Or, to put another way, I suspect the contention that authenticity has traveled so far from what it was originally meant to mean that it now means something like its opposite is true but the real problem was trying to make too much of the concept in the first place. It's a perfect example of Wittgenstein's dictum that you cannot pack more meaning into a word just as you cannot make a teacup hold more than a teacup-full by pouring a gallon of water over it.

"I'm in front of the camera and not behind it"

Here's a video that a lot of people will be familiar with and a lot more people will have never heard of.



As often happens with me, the only reason I know about this bit of pop culture is because Ann Althouse commented on it. She says in her post comment that, "Something very big or very small appears to have happened." And that catches the spirit of the thing. This is like watching the head mean girl from your high school explaining why she felt the need to crush some other kid, destroy them, in front of everyone else. Only this isn't a high school student, Tati Westbrook is married woman in her thirties who has the emotional and moral intelligence of a 17-year-old. That has a lot to do with her success. The beauty and entertainment industry has long been dominated by people who are older than the audience they appeal to; it has long been dominated by people who are driven by a desperate need for love in the form of fame.

The quote in the header to this post appears at about the 40 minute mark. And I get her point: she's 37 years old and she's a beauty icon. That's unusual but not unheard of. On the other hand, the notion that a woman would be big in the beauty industry by working in front of the camera is not exactly revolutionary. You could argue that the teen-aged boy she is slapping down is far more revolutionary in being a gay man in front of the camera although even that is not nearly as new as people like to pretend.

(Doris Day, who died last week, achieved her greatest fame in the years from 37 to 46. And she was a cultural giant who dwarfs all these YouTubers put together.) 

Bottom line: everything we see in this video is the height of conventionality: it's a feud between an ambitious and manipulative woman and an equally ambitious and manipulative gay man who have teamed up to promote unrealistic expectations for young women to motivate them to spend billions of dollars on products that promise more than they deliver. That describes the beauty industry from 1870 to 2019.

Authenticity

What really struck me though was a Vox article Althouse linked to that takes sides in the feud under the guise of explaining it. More precisely, I was intrigued by the way the article used the concept of authenticity.

Authenticity is a weird notion and it's especially odd to find it coming up in this context for authentic is not what Tati Westbrook is. She doesn't even fake it as the old entertainment business joke goes. Everything about her is a performance. I don't criticize her for that. Authenticity isn't what she's aiming for. So why is the word being used?

Here is how Vox brings it up.

But the Charles-Westbrook feud is also as good a look as any into the lucrative ways YouTube works. The platform may reward authenticity and encourage gurus like Charles to open up about their personal lives as well as their work. Yet the YouTube audience can just as easily flip the script and turn on their favorite personality — and decimate not just their public image but their entire livelihood.

The platform rewards authenticity? What the hell are they talking about? That's a serious question because they are talking about something. It just isn't authenticity.

If we look at the quote, authenticity appears to be about opening up about your personal life. Well, you can see Westbrook do that above. Except that she's performing. And she's not hiding the fact that she's performing. She's overacting to a degree that is staggering. That's not opening up.

The second aspect of "authenticity" as Vox sees it is that it's tenuous. The audience could flip on you and turn against you. But authenticity, whatever it is, is said to be a quality about you. Impressions can be wrong and they can, indeed, flip in a second. But if authenticity means anything at all, it has to mean something stable about the person who has it.

The word shows up three times in the article. The second and third are in one paragraph.

BeauTubers’ authority is born out of a perception of authenticity, and many gurus underline this authenticity by opening up about their personal lives onscreen. They reveal their darkest secrets, talk about their miscarriages, or detail their plastic surgery. They continually reassure their subscribers that they wouldn’t have gotten this far without them.

I've left all the links in that just in case you have a desire to see people spill their darkest secrets in a terribly conceited way as part of a pathetic struggle for fame. If we look past that, we see an interesting shift. It's not authenticity that YouTube rewards but "a perception of authenticity". And the stars of the medium "underline this authenticity by opening up about their personal lives onscreen."

Suppose you woke up decided you wanted to be authentic. Would opening up about your personal life in a public forum be a good way to do that? I would think not. I can't imagine a better to way to ensure that you'd lie and lie and lie than doing that. Just the pretense that you'd make yourself vulnerable to people who don't know you in that way seems nonsensical.

I say "seems" because there are clearly people who believe it. Reading about these YouTube stars inspires pity. Someday we will be reading about deaths by suicide. Or, more likely, not as their being completely forgotten will be a factor in those suicides.

Authenticity is a very slippery notion.

"I know it's crazy"

I’ve been fighting to be who I am all my life. What’s the point of being who I am, if I can’t have the person who was worth all the fighting for?

That's by a writer named Stephanie Lennox in a novel called I Don’t Remember You. I haven't read the novel. I don't know that I will. Perhaps it has a different sense in context. That is possible but not likely. This is a sentiment that is often expressed nowadays. Is it unkind, or triggering, to point out that it makes no sense?

Actually, it's worse than nonsensical. "Trying to be who I really am," is a way of lying to herself about what is going on. She knows what she wants to do but that will have consequences and she wants to live in a world where choices don't have consequences. Having to accept that would hurt.

Craving some sort of self-created identity is something teenagers do. Salinger captured it nicely at the end of The Catcher in the Rye.

I thought it was, "If a body catch a body," Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and no ones around - nobody big I mean - except me. And I'm standing on the edge of this crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they are going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know its crazy, but that the only thing I's really like to be. I know its crazy.” 

There's a lot you could unpack in that. He starts off by admitting he misheard the poem that is the inspiration for his imagined identity. He concludes with, "I know its crazy."* The question that is troubling him is, "What do you want to be?" The current version of that is, "What is your identity?" Lies are lived first and told second. There is a life lie, a contradiction in our desires we're scared to confront, underneath that told lie. We want our identity to be a choice but we also want it to be given to us. We want to choose because it doesn't feel free otherwise. But we also want it to be grounded by being given because we don't want anyone else to be allowed to question our choice; a "choice" that, not incidentally, that is (or feels) forced upon us in our teen years.

Incidentally, you couldn't do it. Even if there were only five or six kids playing in the rye at the edge of the cliff, one of them would get past you and plunge to their death. If there were thousands, well ... And, did you ever notice that land near the edges of cliffs doesn't tend to be arable? That you don't find fields of rye near the edges of cliffs? This may seem like entering into the thought experiment on it's own spooky level but that is what you have to do with a thought experiment. Otherwise you're not really doing the experiment. 

It matters a whole lot that the Burns' poem Caulfield mishears is about sex—that he hears a line about sex and imagines a childish world free of sex. The whole fantasy that Holden has is about avoiding adulthood.

Speaking of experiments, one seemingly obvious solution would be to try an identity and then later reject it for another if it doesn't work out. That's a version of the identity lie that some of my generation embraced. David Bowie, it was said, reinvented himself over and over again. I think he even believed that once upon a time but all Bowie's identities were variations on the same pattern and when you look at his rather unhappy life, the suspicion begins to set in that he didn't particularly like any of the variations.

However we might acquire an identity, it's very hard to change once we have it. Here's a seemingly trivial example. As a teen, I admired and emulated Mick Jagger. I didn't look like him beyond having a similar slim build but I figured out how to dance like him and got to be good enough at it that people in clubs would walk up and compliment me.  On one level, I've long moved past that and yet I periodically get an urge to play "Brown Sugar" really, really loud. I can't unlike the music I loved as a teen. And by saying I like that music, I don't mean I put it on and think, "That's a nice tune." No, I get a visceral response to it. I recognize that Don Giovanni is a much greater work of art than Sticky Fingers but I could easily go the rest of my life without hearing Don Giovanni again. 

Imagine how much harder it would be  to uproot the sexual tastes that were inculcated in you as a teen. (Or not, as there are a lot of people who don't much like sex.) I say "inculcated" because it implies something that happened to you. Your sexuality isn't, or isn't entirely, up to you. The culture around you, the people who accept or refuse you, even your own emotions, are beyond your control. The Stoic/Gnostic claim that there is some "inside" you can retreat to, a place where you and only you call the shots/thoughts is like trying to make a knife proof vest—much of the time it will stop the knife but if the world keeps stabbing you, and it will, inevitably a point will find a vulnerability and the blade will penetrate. It will go deep.

It ain't the knife to your heart that tears you apart;
It's the thought of someone
Sticking it in.
Graham Parker

 Is the problem the notion that you're entitled to an identity in the first place? Maybe we just do stuff for a while and one day we realize we have one. 

Is my identity like my body?  I have some control over my body. I can work at being more or less fit. I can control my weight. These both take a lot of work but they can be done. But I can't really pick my body type. That's a contentious statement in an era when people talk about being assigned a gender. It's actually worse than the people who hate it imagine. For my genes didn't just assign me manhood, they assigned me a particular kind of male body. I can, and did, get to be strong by lifting weights but I could never have been a competitive body builder or weightlifter. I just don't have the body type for either.  I suspect identity works the same way. You have a range of choices but you can't pick your identity. Thinking you can, thinking that "fighting to be who I am" is a coherent statement is a recipe for misery.






* I think he means "it's" as in "it is crazy". I don't know if the grammatical mistake is in the original or the transcription I cribbed off the internet. If in the original, it's presumably Caulfield's mistake. Maybe he's adopting the dialect of the source and thereby committing hate speech or something.

In my relentless effort to get a Mad Men angle on everything ...

... even now that the series is over and we're all supposed to stop talking about it, I was thinking about the story of the day. You know, the local NAACP leader who turns out to be a white woman pretending she is black. Along with everybody else, I've been wondering why it's just fine to appropriate someone else's gender sex and utterly wrong to appropriate their race. The argument, of course, is that transgendered people aren't appropriating anything but merely assuming their true identity. But that just moves it back one level for why couldn't there be a white or black person who really believed hat their true race was something other than the body they were born in? Once we allow the move for gender, we need a good reason if we're not going to allow it elswehere.

And that got me thinking about Don Draper having "stolen" another man's identity. As I've argued countless times, he didn't. He escaped his old identity but he hardly stole a new one. He, in fact, made rather more of the name than the dead Don Draper would have done. In any case, the point was that he didn't feel he was the man he'd been born into. And why should he be forced to accept that identity if he doesn't want it?

Ain't you heard? I'm a whore child.

Anyway, this whole question of authenticity is really a purely random thing.  That's the takeaway here.

Authenticity and category mistakes

Authenticity is a legitimate value in some places. Can it be applied to art? Well, again, in some ways yes: Is that an authentic Rembrandt? Is that authentic Limoges? You can even apply it to human beings. Is this person an authentic representative of the group he claims to represent?

A few years ago there was an ad for a major corporation, I think it was IBM, that started with a shot of a very good looking man in a suit and a voice-over that said, "This man works for a large corporation." A friend of mine was in the room when the ad came on TV and said, "Yeah, he works for them as an actor." I don't know if that was true—IBM no doubt had some employees with male-model good looks—but it raises a tricky issue.

If the federal government hires a porn star as a spokesperson in a campaign about STDs, then she is employed by the federal government in some sense. Is she a public servant? How would you resolve that? You might be tempted to say that she is a contract worker and not full time and that would get you somewhere but not very far for the federal government has lots of contract employees.

And what about folk art? s it still folk music if it's sung by Ben Heppner? If it's sung by Ke$ha? Suppose it's sung by a poor person from the rural south but the only reason they are singing this folk song is because they think it might make them more money than the pop music they love the most? That last is not, as we shall soon see, a hypothetical question.

The following is from a review of Inside Llewyn Davis by someone named Todd Alcott. It's interesting in that he opens by saying that the question of authenticity is essential to our understanding of the movie and then proceeds to prove that authenticity is meaningless in this context.

To put yesterday’s question differently, “authenticity” is a key concept in Llewyn Davis. Who is authentic, who is not, who “means it” when they perform music, and who is faking it, who is willing to prostitute his or her talents for the sake of commerce, and who is not. Authenticity wasn’t an issue in O Brother Where Art Thou, the songs performed belonged to everybody. “Old-Timey Music” was a pop-culture fad of the day, and it was used as both a commercial and political tool, but it also rose up out of the very soil under the characters’ feet. The songs of O Brother were being sung whether anyone was listening or not. No such freedom is put forth in Llewyn Davis — all the songs (but for one crucial exception) exist on the commercial stage.

(The subject of American musical authenticity is a tricky one. A while back I read an article in the New York Timesabout how there is evidence to suggest that Robert Johnson, the King of Delta Blues Guitarists, enjoyed playing pop songs and show tunes in his live sets, but recorded his protean blues numbers “because there was a market for ‘race’ records” at the time. If Robert Johnson was motivated by commerce to sing the blues, then there is no authentic blues voice — it’s all show business. Which is also the subject of Llewyn.)

 To which the obvious response is: Then why bring up authenticity in the first place? It does not, and cannot, do any real work in this discussion. (What is true of Robert Johnson is also true of dozens of supposedly authentic artists by the way; not least of whom is Dave Van Ronk who took up folk music when it became obvious there was no market for the traditional jazz that was his first love; being bad at commerce doesn't make him any less commercial than Lady Gaga.)

Another thing that makes Alcott's argument fascinating is that he keeps making harsh criticisms of Llewyn Davis that should necessarily also apply to Dave Van Ronk and Bob Dylan but trying to deflect the argument to protect these two icons.

So we meet Llewyn onstage at the Gaslight, singing a song onstage. The song is “Hang Me, Oh Hang Me,” by Dave Van Ronk. Now, the reader should be aware, that when a song like this is “by” someone, in this venue, what that generally means is that the singer-songwriter has built on a much older song, sometimes a song that has been through a dozen previous permutations. In the case of “Hang Me, Oh Hang Me,” it’s based on a much older song called “I’ve Been All Around This World.” The point I want to make here is that “Hang Me, Oh Hang Me, at first glance, as sung by the bearded hipster Llewyn Davis with no introduction, seems a little bit pretentious. Is this guy, the viewer wonders, really equating himself with a condemned man?

Let's just pretend that argument is legitimate for a moment (it isn't even close to legitimate but let's pretend). If it is, then the criticism should apply even more to Dave Van Ronk. Alcott doesn't think so. Why?

It’s been bandied about that the character of Llewyn is based on Dave Van Ronk, “The Mayor of Macdougal Street,” a mainstay and centerpiece of the Greenwich Village folk scene. This is nonsense. Llewyn shares one or two biographical details with Van Ronk, but has none of his personality. More importantly, he has none of Van Ronk’s expansiveness, his desire to reach out, to promote, to connect. Llewyn is a very inward singer, up in his own head. He demands that the audience comes to him. That demand, in fact, is, I think what the protagonist wants. Llewyn Davis wants success, craves it, but insists that it be on his own terms. Like Bob Dylan (and the movie will continue to draw comparisons to Dylan), Llewyn refuses, absolutely refuses, do do what is expected of him.

The answer is that Alcott approves of Van Ronk and does not approve of Llewyn Davis. Of course, in defending Van Ronk, he seems to be setting up Dylan but he also lets Dylan off the hook. I know you are dying to know how he pulls that one off. The answer is that Dylan is a "genius".

All art, including folk art, is artifice. It has to be. You don't have to be a rape victim to play one in a movie. You don't have to be folk to play folk music and you can play folk music with the intention of becoming a billionaire thereby and it doesn't change the status of the art. What makes something folk is its being adopted as part of folk culture. If the Oscar Meyer Weiner song and Frosty the Snowman aren't folk songs, then nothing is.

But here is a question: Why is Alcott working so hard to prop up these bogus distinctions? That, I think, is the real point of Inside Llewyn Davis. The movie is making a point about the narcissism of the fan as much as that of the artist. It's not interesting that musicians should be narcissists. Who else but a narcissist would subject themselves to the horrors that even a failed musician needs to go through? What is more interesting is that we, the fans, so willingly invest ourselves in other people's narcissistic fantasies.

Without meaning to, I think Todd Alcott answers the question. For one of the things about authenticity is that the ability to recognize it in others implies a claim to have it ourselves. How would know how to distinguish between the real folk singer and the hipster poseur unless there was something "authentic" about my way of understanding the world? For that is what authenticity really boils down to: I am the real thing and everyone else is just a supporting player in my story. What Alcott doesn't see is that he blows his own credibility to pieces in trying to maintain these distinctions. But he shouldn't feel bad: art is either bad or good, authenticity is irrelevant.

Mystical nostalgia and authenticity

Last week I gave the example of a man the Lemon Girl once knew. This man had been doing his genealogy but abandoned it when he found out he was adopted. He decided that the people who had raised him, their history and culture had nothing to do with him.

Today, I want to turn the telescope around and look at the problem from the other end.

Here's a thought experiment,

Suppose you are given a box of books that once belonged to your Aunt. One day, perhaps some considerable time later, you are leafing through one of these books and a letter falls out. It is a letter your mother wrote to her sister decades ago. In it, she confesses that she is pregnant by a man who is not your father. She names the man. You recognize him as a friend of your parents' from the early days of their marriage. You look at the date at the top of the letter and realize with a jolt that the child she conceived is you!

You know the name of the man who you now realize is your biological father. There are a few pictures of him in your family photo album and you remember a few stories in which he figures. Other than that, you don't know much about him other than that he died a few years ago.

Here is the question: Other than having passed on his DNA, what has this man to do with you? Is his life, are his dreams, his culture, his family heritage, important to you?

Some people will unhesitatingly answer, yes. Others will be more hesitant.

But it's more than an abstract question. I might immediately think this person relevant to my life but never get around to actually doing anything about it. That I do or that I don't might say something about how much I really feel that this person has something to do with me.

What do I think? Well, this is one of those rare occasions where I think Sartre is right. Your connection with this man will be important if you make something of it. If you don't, it isn't important. It's entirely up to you to choose. If you choose, then his culture becomes part of yours. If not, then not.

When I object to authenticity, it is the sense that you don't have a choice that I object to. I object to the notion that there is a certain kind of world or life experience that naturally goes with some states of life and that some sort of moral compulsion follows from this. "You're white and male, you couldn't possibly understand what we feel or experience unless we educate you," or, "As a woman you owe it to other women to be a feminist."

Downton Abbey

As an aside, there is a wild debate on an issue related to this going on between members of my extended family on Facebook right now. It was all inspired by an article from The Telegraph in which journalist Katy Rink (great name!) claims that the show is boring. If you read the article, however, you quick realize that the author's point is not so much that the show is boring but that she wants you to find it boring and stop watching it.

More importantly, she wants you to all stop identifying with it.

Let us not cling on, hopelessly to this ridiculous sentiment – this nostalgia for our great loves of the past – which sees us paddling around in the pitiful wash of the great steamer. 

And that is her real problem. She thinks that world was inauthentic and she wants everyone, especially women!, to start living what she considers authentic woman lives. A lot of women, however, keep thwarting her by choosing to identify with a past she wishes would just go away.

If it was just Downton Abbey, Katy Rink's impotent rage would seem over the top but it isn't of course. Millions of women love all sorts of period dramas from the novels of Jane Austen to Mad Men and they openly express their desire to return to these more formal times. And these women aren't stupid—they understand about the benefits of antibiotics, modern dentistry, women's rights and so forth—but they also see that something worth having back has been lost too. They want to reclaim it as theirs and, because they do, it is theirs.

Studiously Uncool (6)

There will be probably another post coming on Mad Men later today but I wanted to deal with some personal disclosure before that.